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Monday, 12 March 2012

Odyssey's End?: The Search for Ancient Ithaca

A British researcher believes he has at last pinpointed the island to which Homer's wanderer returned

Amateur scholar Robert
Bittlestone says that the valley forming an isthmus on Cephalonia was
once a sea channel dividing the island in two. "Across that valley," he
says, "lay the ancient island of Ithaca," home to Odysseus

Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from its
original form and updated to include new information for Smithsonian’s
Mysteries of the Ancient World bookazine published in Fall 2009.
Robert Bittlestone is standing above the village of Petrikata,
looking over red-tile roofs down upon a narrow isthmus that connects the
two parts of the Greek island of Cephalonia, off Greece’s western
coast. In the valley below, farmers in overalls are harvesting olives. A
light breeze carries the scent of oregano and thyme. “This looks like
solid ground that we’re standing on,” Bittlestone says. “But every­thing
under us is rockfall. Across that valley was the ancient island of
Ithaca.”
Bittlestone, a British management consultant by profession, believes
he has solved a mystery that has bedeviled scholars for more than 2,000
years. In Odysseus Unbound, published in 2005 by Cambridge
University Press, he argues that a peninsula on the island of Cephalonia
was once a separate island—Ithaca, the kingdom of Homer’s Odysseus some
3,000 years ago. He believes that the sea channel dividing the two
islands was filled in by successive earthquakes and landslides, creating
the peninsula of Paliki, as it is known today.
Like Heinrich Schliemann, the businessman who discovered the site of
ancient Troy in the 1870s, and Michael Ventris, the architect who
deciphered the written language of Minoan Crete in the 1950s, the
57-year-old Bittlestone is part of an honorable tradition of inspired
amateurs who have made extraordinary discoveries outside the confines of
conventional scholarship. “Bittlestone’s insight is brilliant,” says
Gregory Nagy, director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, in
Washington, D.C. “He has done something very important. This is a real
breakthrough convergence of oral poetry and geology, and the most
plausible explanation I’ve seen of what Ithaca was in the second
millennium B.C. We’ll never read the Odyssey in the same way again.”
Even more provocatively, Bittlestone, who was able to draw upon
sophisticated technological tools unavailable to scholars before him,
believes that events like those described in the Odyssey may
well have taken place, and that telltale landmarks from the hero’s
adventures on Ithaca can be found on Cephalonia’s Paliki peninsula. “I
find most events that are described on the island perfectly credible,”
he says, adding that the chapters recounting Odysseus’ fantastical
adventures among magical figures—the sea monster Scylla and man-eating
whirlpool Charybdis, or the enchantress Circe—obviously owe a great deal
to the poetic imagination.
“By far the most important part of this is the argument that modern
Paliki was ancient Ithaca,” says James Diggle, a professor of Greek and
Latin at Cambridge University. “Of this, I haven’t the slightest doubt.
It’s irresistible, and supported by geology. The other part is more
speculative. But once you go over the terrain, there is an extraordinary
match.”
Since ancient times, the location of Homer’s Ithaca has been one of
literature’s great conundrums. The third-century B.C. geographer
Eratosthenes sighed, “You will find the scene of the wanderings of
Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.”
Some dismissed Homer’s geography as a poet’s guesswork. As the renowned
classicist Bernard Knox once put it, “When Homer’s characters move to
mainland Greece and its western offshore islands, confusion reigns.”
Modern scholars have proposed numerous locations, some as far afield
as Scotland or the Baltic. The most obvious candidate was the
present-day island of Ithaca, which lies east of Cephalonia. But it
doesn’t fit Homer’s description: